Lost in space: Liz Truss, the weightless Prime Minister

I don’t think it is fully appreciated what a peculiar Prime Minister Liz Truss is going to be. Other politicians have climbed the greasy pole. Some have been described as having risen without trace. Liz Truss is the first to have floated to the top, uniquely weightless.

For she was not the choice of MPs. In the first round of MP voting, she recruited just 50 of the Conservative MPs, a derisory number for someone who had been so nakedly ambitious for so long. Fizz with Liz, it seems, fell flat. She scrambled into the last two by the skin of her teeth.

Nor is she the choice of the general public. She has yet to get their sanction at a general election. She has borrowed the majority of her predecessor.

She has decisively persuaded her party members that she is a better option than her opponent. Yet all the polling suggests that they still hanker for her predecessor.

So next week she will start uniquely weak for a Prime Minister, with no base of positive support anywhere. (In this she most resembles a lightweight US vice-president suddenly thrust into the Oval Office by the demise of their running mate. Harry S Truman made a good fist of it. Gerald Ford did not. Would Kamala Harris, if called upon?)

Her in-tray looks incredibly daunting. The cost of living crisis, the energy crisis, Ukraine and the NHS crisis all look sense to tower over the first few months of her tenure. Any one of these might consume the attention of a Prime Minister in normal times. She is going to have to deal with all four and fast. Brutally difficult decisions will need to be made.

It is at this point that having a weightless Prime Minister will cause problems. She will need to call for sacrifices from a public that never voted for her. She will need to persuade demonstrably sceptical MPs to vote for unpopular policies and risk their own jobs for her. How is she going to inspire and lead in those circumstances?

She does not have enough control of her party to ram policies through as a machine politician like Gordon Brown would do. So her only answer — unless she is willing to gamble on an early election at a time when the cost of living crisis is really going to be biting hard — must be by force of personality and argument.

That means that she needs to establish herself quickly in the public’s mind with her style and personality. She needs to make her policy prescriptions to the public fluently, and do so herself.

This makes her decision to duck out of an interview with Nick Robinson on the BBC baffling. No number of print interviews in friendly newspapers is an adequate substitute for a BBC television interview. She appears not to understand the weakness of her own position and how she needs to remedy it. She might not succeed in portraying herself to the public as a convincing political figure. She will certainly fail if she doesn’t try to reach out to them to do so. Unless she realises this quickly and starts putting herself front and centre of her new government’s policies, we can expect her bubble to pop — and potentially very quickly.

The question then becomes: what might keep Liz Truss in power? Her MPs will give her some time, in deference to the mandate that she is about to secure from party members. Jeremy Corbyn was given almost a year by Labour MPs and it took the shock of the Brexit referendum vote before they took futile action. Conservative MPs, if they are unhappy, might show less restraint for two reasons: first, the Conservatives are in government, so failings by their leader will be that much more conspicuous than those of the leader of the Opposition; and secondly, unlike Jeremy Corbyn, the members seem to be more enthused by a candidate who wasn’t on the ballot paper than by the merits of Liz Truss herself, meaning that Conservative MPs will not fear their wrath if they move against her.

Set against that, there are two reasons that might stay Conservative MPs’ hands. MPs who do not relish the return of Boris Johnson are unlikely to want to engineer an opportunity for him to do just that. Also, the current leadership election has been a long-running distraction that has done the Conservative party no good at all, making it look inward-looking and without solutions for the serious problems the country faces. It can ill afford another 9 weeks like that, especially if the country remains in crisis.

The net of all this is that if Liz Truss is merely weakly incompetent, she may endure for quite a while even if poll ratings look dismal for her and her party. There is a cost in deposing leaders and MPs will not want to incur it twice in quick succession unless they must.

Also, MPs will need some kind of a moment to prompt them to act. Boris Johnson provided them with moments in abundance. It seems unlikely at present that Liz Truss will tell untruths in Parliament that are easily exposed or that she will be brazenly impenitent if exposed. It seems more likely that there may be a policy moment (Theresa May found herself facing a vote of confidence over the Brexit withdrawal agreement and never recovered her authority). This means that Liz Truss will need to be careful to be seen to be broadly consistent with her leadership campaign — or to get her betrayals in quickly before there will be any appetite to replace her. Does she realise this?

The net of all this is that I expect Liz Truss to lead an unpopular government and a divided party, to lose the limited public goodwill that she starts with and to preside over a government that will be tossed around like flotsam in the coming typhoon that it will be wholly inadequate to set a course through.

But despite lacking authority, she may well prove rather more enduring in office, if not power, than some currently expect. Her tenure as Prime Minister looks pretty certain to be nasty and brutish, but not quite as short as some anticipate.